In today's computing environment, a large number of organizations interconnect their local area networks (‘LANs’) to the Internet using a service provider network. Typically, the LANs are located at a single physical site and include network assets such as routers, bridges, and other networking equipment. Generally, the service provider's network spans the public Internet infrastructure and consists of networking and telecommunication equipment such as routers, switches, and access nodes. Typically, access nodes of the provider's network are used to interconnect the LANs.
Given the interconnectivity between service provider and organizational networks, network events (e.g., faults, outages or other conditions requiring support) can occur that affect services of interconnected networks. For example, a network failure on a particular access node may affect not only LANs attached to that node, but other access nodes configured to provide services to other organizational networks. Similarly, a network equipment failure on a particular organization's network may have a reverberating effect not only on the service provider's network but also on other organization networks.
In addition to network equipment or other resource level failures, network events can result from service level failures of an IT infrastructure. Resource level generally refers to information pertaining to assets that is used by a service provider to support the information technology service. In other words, resource level refers to features or parameters of information technology infrastructure assets that are important from a service provider's perspective and includes information regarding hardware assets that support the information technology service software. Service level generally refers to information pertaining to assets that is used by a service user or customer of the information technology service. In other words, service level refers to features or parameters of information technology infrastructure assets that are important from a service user's perspective and includes the functional aspects of the service that are felt or experienced through the information technology service software.
Failures at the service (or business) level may or may not result in error or alarm conditions at the resource level, e.g., alarms due to network communication hardware failures. However, failures at the service level can result in outage conditions from a business perspective that may involve long delays before the business service is restored, even when the resource level appears to be functioning normally.
Current efforts to trouble shoot network events are typically handled at the resource level by available tooling in which information is directly keyed in by a user into the tool, in response to an alarm or error condition, or by tooling that has an auto-discovery function responsive to such conditions. However, these tools cannot effectively penetrate the service or business impact part of the IT infrastructure.
As a result, there is a need for a tool that allows a user to quickly determine the functionality at the service level and identify failures among assets at the service level of a multi-tiered infrastructure. There is also a need to bridge the gap left by available tooling, which examines the resource level, to assist in trouble shooting failures at the service or business level.